Arizona light

There is something special about the sunlight in Arizona. At the Rick Joy lecture, he was struggling to put it into words "the light in Arizona isn't yellowish, like you see in Arizona Highways magazine, it's pure white," or something along those lines. He's right. It's this phenomenally pure, brilliant white light. Driving from the airport, I was transfixed, drunk on the shadows cast on the freeway walls, by how the sunlight shaded the various faces of passes into nearly graphic elements. Coming from St.Louis, if light is like media, the light in St.Louis is like an old VHS tape- filtered, grainy, hesitant, uncertain. Phoenix light is like a HD-DVD or BluRay. There's this leap of clarity and rendering. Architecture looks great in Arizona light because it renders everything so cleanly and purely, and everything stands in sharp relief against the deep blue sky.